The Aviator Scene Setting for Martin Scorsese’s Epic Film on the Legendary Howard Hughes

I have to be like a chameleon,” says Dante Ferretti, “and jump from one place and one period to another. I don’t want to just copy a period—I want to live in it.” In the past two decades Ferretti, a production designer with seven Oscar nominations to his credit, has lived in medieval Italy (The Name of the Rose), the South of the Civil War (Cold Mountain; see Architectural Digest, March 2004), modern Manhattan (Meet Joe Black; see Architectural Digest, April 1998), 19th-century Manhattan (The Age of Innocence and Gangs of New York) and 20th-century Tibet (Kundun). Though he is Italian—his mentors were two of Italy’s greatest directors, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini—for his most recent picture Ferretti has resided in what might be called his spiritual home: Hollywood during its golden age.

Scheduled for release during the holidays, Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, which cost a staggering $110 million to make, is what the movie trades call a biopic—the sprawling saga of one of Hollywood’s favorite characters, Howard Hughes. Rich, handsome, brilliant and increasingly deranged, Hughes has been irresistible to scriptwriters and directors alike, as can be seen in such films as The Carpetbaggers (1964), The Amazing Howard Hughes (1977) and Melvin and Howard (1980). Now it is the turn of Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays Hughes during the two most dramatic decades of his life, from 1927 to 1947.

The film begins in California, where the young Hughes, fresh from Texas, decides he has what it takes to direct a movie and soon makes one of the era’s best, Hell’s Angels (1930). As fascinated by aviation as he is by the movies, he then proceeds to design and fly his own models, own a controlling interest in an airline (TWA) and build the world’s biggest airplane, a flying boat that the press irreverently dubs the Spruce Goose. (That mammoth machine, which was hidden from the public until Hughes’s death, now roosts in a museum in McMinnville, Oregon.) Along the way he finds time to create two movie stars, Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, and romance several others, most notably Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner.

If the depiction of such an outsize figure was a challenge for DiCaprio, Scorsese and scriptwriter John Logan, the recreation of the period, or periods, was no less a challenge for Ferretti and a team that included his wife, set decorator Francesca LoSchiavo, a five-time Oscar nominee. Most of Ferretti’s other films were set in either a distant past or a distant location. The Aviator is set in a place and time familiar to most moviegoers. “We had to be very accurate, very believable, because many people know the period,” says Ferretti, “and I think we were. Martin was happy with what we did. I’ve done six movies with him. Now he trusts me.”

“I am by nature a perfectionist, and I seem to have trouble allowing anything to go through in a half-perfect condition.” Those are Howard Hughes’s own words, but they might just as well have been spoken by two other perfectionists, Scorsese and Ferretti. Before beginning production, Scorsese presented Ferretti with research books and archival photographs, along with an explanation of exactly how he wanted the movie to look, right down to the camera angles. Ferretti continued from there. “I like to think like somebody in the period,” he explains. “I’m a little like an actor. I change personality. This for me is the best way to work.”

In The Aviator, key scenes take place in one of Hollywood’s most glamorous nightclubs, that Moroccan fantasy called the Cocoanut Grove. Although the Grove has gone the way of many of the movie world’s landmarks, Ferretti and LoSchiavo were able to get a measure of its size by visiting the vast room it once occupied in Los Angeles’s Ambassador Hotel. Armed with that knowledge and stacks of photographs, they then worked round the clock for four weeks to re-create the original on a soundstage in Montreal, where most of the film’s interior scenes were shot. “A phenomenal scene,” is how DiCaprio describes his—Hughes’s—first entrance into the club. “Women are on swings overhead, pheasant goes by on a waiter’s tray, the band starts to play, people are drunk and dancing, a whole society is celebrating, and this young god of the industry is coming in to take over.”

Other important scenes are set in the Manhattan office of Hughes’s rival, Juan Trippe, head of Pan Am Airways—Alec Baldwin plays the sleek and smooth-talking Trippe. For that lavish Art Déco interior, as well as for the interiors of Hughes’s and Hepburn’s houses in California, Lo Schiavo moved a good part of Los Angeles to Montreal. “I felt everything had to be really authentic,” she says. “Hughes was one of the richest men in America. We couldn’t decorate his house and office with props, so I worked for three months in Los Angeles rounding up the very best objects, furniture, painting, fabrics and antiques.”

An architect as well as a designer—he built homes for Pasolini and the Italian novelist Alberto Moravia—Ferretti also constructed in Montreal a replica of the front and forecourt of Hollywood’s Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, where Hell’s Angels had its premiere in 1930. “My God!” one of the producers gasped. “You’ve made it full size!” No, he hadn’t, Ferretti calmly replied. He had made it one foot larger than the Hollywood Boulevard original. “My megalomania,” Ferretti laughs.

For production designers, particularly designers of epics like The Aviator, megalomania is not only a virtue, it is a necessity. How else could Ferretti, in 12 short weeks, have designed and built nightclubs, mansions and movie theaters, not to mention the largest airplane that ever took wing? “My only problem is how much time I have to prepare,” says Ferretti. “I never have enough. It’s always a miracle, but we’re always ready—even if it’s five minutes before shooting.”